Joachim Fritsch points at his personal file compiled by East Germany's secret police Stasi, in his flat in Berlin October 22, 2009.THOMAS PETER/Reuters
Roland Jahn is the federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records Authority. The archive, which can be accessed by the public, holds the trove of documents recovered from East Germany's secret police. A dissident, Mr. Jahn was banished from East Germany in 1983. He recently published a book: We Conformists. He participated in an e-mail interview.
As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, do you think there are still psychological barriers between people in the former East and West Germany?
To me, that all depends on whether you accept these categories. Of course there are differences in how we grew up and how we are formed. And there is a difference between growing up in a dictatorship or in a democracy. But I personally chose to just be German and be curious about the ways we all contribute to our society.
You have written in your book that many former residents of East Germany cannot relate to the role of either perpetrator or victim.
I think it is time that we break away from the stereotypes of what it was like to live in East Germany under the one-party-rule of the SED [East Germany's Communist Party]. We have looked in large part at the perpetrators and the people who suffered greatly from the oppression of human rights in East Germany. We need to pay respect to the victims. But there are many people who conformed to the demands of the life under the SED and do not remember their life in East Germany as a necessarily bad experience. I wanted to encourage people to reflect more on their own role in the functioning of 40 years of dictatorship. If the majority hadn't conformed, the party rulers and the Stasi couldn't have secured their power for so long.
How has the role of the Stasi Records Authority changed in recent years?
We still receive over 5,000 requests a month from individuals to gain access to their own records. Certainly the numbers are going down. About two million people have already requested access and seen files. We have noticed a slow increase in relatives of the deceased who have an interest in understanding their family history in the East through accessing the Stasi records. The Stasi manipulated many lives and it is even a great help for the next generation to find out how it changed the fate of one's own father or grandfather.
But the Stasi records serve a much wider function in the long run. It was for the first time ever that a society decided to open a secret-police archive completely to the public and that is a major feat. It serves as a constant reminder to our democracy on where not to go.
Do you think the legacy of the Stasi will have a permanent impact on how Germans approach issues of privacy and surveillance?
I think the experience of the SED dictatorship and, to a degree, also the Nazi dictatorship, changed Germans' relationship with the impact the state can have on its citizens. West Germans before 1989 were very adamant about privacy and keeping the state out of their personal data. With all the information gained from understanding the mechanisms of the Stasi's work through accessing its records after 1990 or having lived in East Germany,This sensibility has certainly increased. And that is a good thing. Today's digital world, though, challenges us on very new levels to deal with privacy, data collection and the state.
This interview has been edited and condensed